Greenlighter Hoax

So when I arrived home at my Oakland cottage yesterday I opened up my mailbox. I was surprised to find a letter addressed to me from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Dear Cyrus Farivar, Recently, your story “Green-Collar Crime: How I Stopped an Internet Sex Hoax,” came to my attention. This is the type of story that the Mongerson Prize for Investigateive Reporting on the News honors. Since 2002, the Mongerson Prize has recognized reporters for serving…

If you want to follow the Wikipedia nonsense that’s been following me since this the Slate piece was printed, check these entries. Otherwise, enjoy, and feel free to email me.

Greenlighter.org RIP July 2, 2005 – July 6, 2005 Fellas, it’s been fun. Really.

This is from one “Ding Chavez” (oh come now, Internet pseudonyms are so 1996). With all due respect, you seem like the kind of person that would go to a child’s birthday party uninvited, and then proceed to explain loudly how the magician does all his tricks. Don’t you have anything better to write about? Like that whole political corruption and war thing going on, that’s a popular one. Please get a sense of humor and then optionally go report…

[images redacted] So apparently I scared the living daylights out of WookieFetish.com, so much so that they deleted all of their posts talking about their hoaxing operation and replaced them with dumb and obviously made up posts about wookies and what not. Where their new online hideout is, I do not know. Oh, and fellas, here’s a tip. If I wanted to start an Internet hoax from one forum and then migrate it to another — I wouldn’t use the…

When I try to login to WookieFetish, I get the following: You have been banned from this forum. Please contact the webmaster or board administrator for more information. Wow, that took two hours. Pretty good, fellas. If anyone else wants to infiltrate their board, please email me. Thanks!

That’s right, a quick check of my referral logs show that the good folks over at WookieFetish.com, or more accurately, their forum, seemed to pay attention to my post about Greenlighters. Welcome, friends. (More below the fold)

Metafilter reports on a new Internet community of “Greenlighters”, people who wear green polo shirts with the collars turned up as a signal of sexual interest. Not surprisingly this “community” has a website, which for now is down, but I can verify earlier today that it did have some postings on it. The site, which was registered yesterday, is in the name of [redacted], a University of Michigan student. I can’t help (as some other MeFiers were as well), be…